Add extra Analytics to your Links with Bitly Link Shortener

Knowledge is power. Knowing how many people hit your website and which pages they are viewing is one thing, but actually seeing which links are being clicked and having a set of statistics for each link – that’s pretty useful!

Today I want to talk about the power of Bitly – a link shortening service that offers you so much more than just a shorter URL.

Bitly Link Shortening

First and foremost Bitly is a link shortening service, which in itself is very useful for use with Twitter. A URL such as http://readysteadypro.co.uk/2014/02/17/seo-tips-photographers-blogging/ is 71 characters long – it’s huge! So, when you’ve got a limit of 140 characters this URL is just too long (It takes up over half your character limit!). It would only leave you 69 characters to compose your tweet. So, take your URL and paste it into Bitly and you end up a far more Twitter-Friendly URL: http://bit.ly/MrG7PW. This is 20 characters long.

Link Archive

Okay Okay, so Twitter does actually perform some shortening on your URL – but with Bitly it will save all of your shortened URL’s for you to re-use. This means that rather than pasting odd and random URL;s over and over you can delve back into Bitly, grab the shortened URL you made before and paste that to your blog, tiwtter, facebook, Google+ etc. Re-using the same link also gives you some wonderful advantages:

More than just a shorter link

Having access to re-use the same shortened URL means you can track the clicks and the source of those clicks. So, when you write a new blog post and share it all over the internet on all of your social media presences, rather than scratching your head, wandering where all the traffic comes from, all you need to do it take a look at the clear and coherent analytics on Bitly:

Clicks on a link

See below: You can see here how many clicks each link got and on which days. Beneath that it will even tell you how the link is performing on various, connected Social Media accounts.

Link Summary

In this screen grab you can see how my links have been performing. As a bonus it also shows where the links were clicked in terms of Geography.

A Powerful Tool

So, in conjunction with Google Webmaster tools and the in-built analytics for your website (such as Squarespace) you can easily get a feel for exactly how each link you share, is performing.